shutterstock_141144724You signed up for a fitness class at the gym so you could lose five pounds, took it diligently and dropped the weight.

Your sister signed up for the same fitness class, took it sparingly, and then dropped the class without losing any weight.

What motivated you to go to the class each time, participate in the class, follow through with your fitness plan and lose the weight?

And why wasn’t your sister motivated to do the same?

(If you find YOU can’t get motivated, learn how in our Motivation Booster class, which teaches students techniques for getting – and staying – motivated!)

What Are Theories of Motivation?

Theories of motivation try to explain why people do the things they do. What makes one person more motivated than the next to accomplish the same goal? Where does the motivation come from? Is your reward something you can touch, or is it something you feel inside? (If you can’t find the motivation at all and you find yourself constantly negating your abilities, it might be time to take Motivation to Dream Bigger, which will teach you how to monitor the negative self chatter.

Oftentimes our motivation to do something – run a marathon, read a particular book, attend church, eat dinner – depends on a specific situation. For example, eating, many times, happens because we are hungry. In most instances we don’t get ‘rewarded’ for eating. We don’t win a medal when we finish our meal at the end of the day – unless, of course, our ‘medal’ is a piece of cake and we only eat the meal to get the piece of cake.

Most of the time, though, we eat because our body is hungry. We hope the food tastes good, but sometimes we have to eat because if we don’t we will get ill from lack of food.

Sometimes we are motivated to do a task for a number of reasons, and those reasons may vary. We might run a marathon because:

We need to